Puppet Discovery 2013

We transformed our classrooms into several puppet theatres for Discovery today. Some children loved performing,while others preferred to be an appreciative audience.

 One of the most popular puppets shows performed by the children was the shadow threatre. I think we have a ghost and a puppy performing in this show. The children traced their puppet onto card, cut it out, and used a wooden skewer for the handle.

 One of our junior school teachers has a huge collection of finger and glove puppets, including this Cat in the Hat and snapping crocodile.

 

 We encouraged the children to make their own puppets, I love the expressions on the faces of these spoon puppets.

These easy octopus puppets are made with a paper plate and crepe paper streamers, they are decorated with a collage of tissue paper and glitter. You can sellotape the bottom of the paper plate to the back of the puppet as a handle.

The Leaves Came Sailing Down....

 Our Autumn leaves are falling off the trees and into our classroom.

 These leaves are created with a crayon and dye wax resist. Click here to see how we made our leaves.

 

 We have also been reading these Autumn poems - Autumn and An Autumn Greeting.

 

 

Autumn Discovery 2013

 Autumn is a great time of year to get children thinking about the seasons and how each season is different from the others. Autumn brings with it colder weather, but beautiful Autumn leaves. Today we spent the morning thinking about and discovering about Autumn. 

During the week we have been 'leaf hunting' and collecting leaves to put aside for today's Discovery session.

 

 We created leaf rubbings with some of the leaves we collected.

 We used some of the large leaves to make leaf boats (and several leaf submarines). 

 We cut paper leaves and made miniature leaf books. This book has some sight words carefully recorded. Some children wrote the names of their friends or family members.

 We traced, cut, and finger painted Autumn trees.

 This is my favourite photo of today's session, these boys were working together to complete the activity.

At the start of each Discovery session we talk about being kind, sharing, and what we can do to be helpful, because some things are tricky for people to do own their own. These boys spent at least 20 minutes making an Autumn hand-print tree, every step was done together, including showing me the finished piece of art. I'm not sure what they were more pleased with - the artwork or the fact that they made it together.

 We also got out the wooden construction table to enjoy in the Autumn sunshine. Our school principal came over especially to teach some of our budding builders how to saw and hammer without losing a limb!

 

 Lots of beautiful apples are ready to eat in Autumn so we made apple prints with 1/2 an apple and a small green leaf.

But one very popular activity was using two different special apple cutting machines - 

 And eating the apples!

 This machine peeled, cored, and cut the apple. The children (and adults) were fascinated.

Yum!

Making Juice

As part of our inquiry learning unit we have been looking at 'brainfood'. 

 We found out that we need to eat a variety of food to give us energy, and fruit and vegetables are full of energy and nutrients.

Today I brought in apples, oranges, pears, green and gold kiwifruit, carrots, celery, and pineapple, and we experimented making and tasting different flavours of juice. The children were fascinated to see how carrots and celery can make juice too. Thanks to my marvelous teacher aide who brought in her juicer and a little ginger root!

I encouraged the children to try each juice, even if it was only a sip.

Some of our juice recipes included:
Fruit Salad
1 green kiwifruit, 1 apple, 1 pear, 1 orange, 2 gold kiwifruit, 1/4 whole pineapple - this was an overwhelming favourite.

Goody Gumdrops
1/4 whole pineapple, 2 oranges, 2 green kiwifruit, (you can also add strawberries to this recipe)

Sunshine O
4 carrots, 3 oranges, 1/4 teaspoon fresh ginger

Super Vege
2 apples, 3 oranges, 2 sticks celery

How to Draw a Worm

 Have you ever wanted to know how to draw a worm?

Well, look here ....

Before 9 o'clock this morning one of my clever children drew one extremely long worm and one tiny baby worm. He then decided to make instructions to share with the class about how we could draw our own worms. 

Together at maths time we all came up with some words that describe the length and size of his worms.

I love how he numbered each step in his instructions, you can't see it in the photo but step 5 is about drawing on a little smiley face!

Mother's Day 2013

With a very special day coming up this weekend we spent our first Discovery session of Term 2 discovering about our mums, what mums love, and how to show our mothers that we love them. 

Here are a few of the activities we enjoyed:

 Mums love flowers, so we made these simple hand-print lilies with white paper and pipe-cleaners. 

Cutting activities for Discovery encourage the children to use scissors to cut meaningfully. Knowing where your thumb and fingers go when holding scissors, how to open and close them, and how to hold what you are cutting in your other hand is something that seems to come automatically to adults, but may need to be explicitly taught and modelled to children. 

Your child can cut strips of paper into squares, cut along straight and wavy lines,or cut around shapes and pictures. They can cut paper, card, ribbon, or pieces of material. Using scissors that are the correct size for makes it all a little bit easier too and are worthwhile to purchase. Left-handed children may prefer left-handed scissors, or they may develop a technique that allows for right-handed scissors.

 To show that we love our mum, we screwed up small pieces of tissue and made a colourful heart collage.

 Mums love clothes (well my mum does), so we made paper dolls and dressed them in dresses using different patterned material. I love the happy faces and hair on the mothers in the second picture.

 Mums love jewellery, so we made beautiful flower bracelets, this bracelet is being modelled by the mother of one of our mountaineers. 

 One Mother's Day you can give a card to your mother, so we wrote cards to our mums.

Happy Mother's Day!

 Have a look at what we did this time last year for Mother's Day.

ANZAC Day Discovery

Quilt by Brenda McPartlin.

Mrs McP is one of our very talented junior school teachers, she shared her stunning poppy quilt with us today.

 At the start of Discovery today we were lucky enough to have a parent who is in the army come to talk to us about his job and ....

.... teach us to march.

Then we ....

.... made New Zealand flags ....

.... stamped poppies with our fingers ....

.... played with these very special toy soldiers and army vehicles ....

 

.... built tanks out of old boxes ....

 

.... made medals out of silver foil and cardboard ....

 .... and started to make a beautiful poppy wreath to take to the ANZAC Day parade in Upper Hutt.

Check out the ANZAC Day wreaths we made last year with our senior school buddies.

ANZAC Day and the meaning behind it can be hard to explain to children. We discussed how it is a special day to remember New Zealand and Australia soldiers who died in a battle at Gallipoli during the First World War.

We looked at this book 'My Grandad Marches on ANZAC Day.'

This website talks in more detail about ANZAC Day, Gallipoli and their significance.